For 38 years now, when you read @ anywhere online, it meant AT.

Now Twitter is the fever, and it seems that somewhere along the stampede back to a primitive form of Internet Relay Chat, the Twitter crew thought it’d be a great idea to put the AT before the username, breaking the very URL standard that made Twitter possible via REST calls originating from iPhones, Blackberrys, Androids and ubiquitous networked embedded Brainfuck devices roaming the globe on their own.

Remember, when you authenticate via REST, you’re sending Twitter a http://TWITTERSCREENNAME:password@www.twitter.com/rest/call URL.

The W3C URL spec is very clear about where the username should go:

The URL system, first conceived by Tim Berners-Lee, respected the Arpanet email convention, as cited above.

IRC, which is a much more advanced global conversational system than Twitter is(and will be for the foreseeable future) respects the user@destination convention.

The DNS system, probably the service closest to the core of the Internet infrastructure, substitutes the first dot for a @, but the syntax is still user.host.domain.tld, which translates to user@host.domain.tld.

Heck, even Carl Sagan’s crew respected the standard(proper_name@location) when they brought SETI@home to us all.

So, why is Twitter going against the standard with their own message addressing? Just so they can brag that they convinced a brazillion users to type ass-backwards 140-char micromessages? I’d say Twitter needs to be responsible with their new midiatic powers and adapt to the standard, so that younger users typing in Twitter replies can become awesome hackers like Jon@Postel.org, not @Jon.

SomeUser@ is the correct syntax when replying to Tweets, meaning you’re addressing a shortcut for SomeUser@twitter. Writing @myname turns people into places and leaves me wondering what the heck should go before the @.

“Be liberal in what you accept, and conservative in what you send.”
– jon

#BrazilWantsJBAgain e #JBcomebacktoBrazil have taken over Twitter this afternoon. I just found out JB means Jonas Brothers… apparently the present day version of Menudo.